The Paradise Trap by Catherine Jinks

Author:Catherine Jinks [Catherine Jinks]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781742693972
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-06-30T14:00:00+00:00

33

‘THEY DON’T EXIST . . .’

EVERYONE GOGGLED AT JAKE.

‘It’s true!’ he insisted. ‘She’s a witch of some kind!’

Newt pulled a sceptical face. Edison uttered an awestruck ‘Wow!’ as Sterling’s forehead creased.

‘Are you sure you don’t mean “siren”?’ Marcus proposed, eliciting a snort from Newt.

‘I told you, sirens were made up by the ancient Greeks,’ Newt scoffed. ‘They don’t exist. They never existed.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Marcus. He couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice. ‘So sirens don’t exist, but magic lifts do? This isn’t a computer game, in case you haven’t noticed.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Edison peered up at Sterling from beneath the rim of his pith helmet. ‘I thought you said it was.’

‘I’m pretty certain it is,’ his father assured him, then addressed Marcus in a sympathetic tone. ‘The trouble is, it’s such an advanced and complex computer game that it feels like magic.’

Marcus cast up his eyes. ‘You wish,’ he growled, before Jake suddenly hijacked the conversation.

‘Listen to me!’ he cried. ‘I know what I saw! You all think I’m crazy, but I’m not! She was going to build a beach house out of my bones – she said so!’

Everyone flinched.

‘Oh my God.’ Coco was horrified. ‘How sick. She actually told you that?’

Jake hesitated. ‘Well . . . no. Not exactly,’ he had to admit. Seeing his audience exchange doubtful glances, he erupted again. ‘She was singing to herself! I overheard her!’ He went on to explain how, upon first entering Miss Molpe’s caravan (‘the one out there, not the real one’), he’d been planning to ask her if she’d send him home after all. He’d even packed his suitcase for the trip back. ‘But she wasn’t in,’ he related, ‘so I had a look around. And I found all these . . . these bones.’ He had to swallow before continuing. A muscle began to quiver in his jaw. ‘They were stacked in cupboards,’ he said faintly. ‘Laid out in drawers. Like a collection.’

‘Maybe they were animal bones,’ Holly speculated.

Jake shook his head. ‘Not these ones,’ he growled. ‘And there were piles of old clothes, too. Kids’ clothes.’ Hearing a few indrawn breaths, he quickly explained, ‘She wasn’t collecting for charity, either, because all the clothes had bloodstains on them.’

Marcus didn’t like the sound of that. Neither did Holly, to judge from the look on her face.

But Coco wasn’t convinced.

‘Well, I used to go into Miss Molpe’s caravan all the time,’ she objected, ‘and I never saw anything weird.’

‘Because you were in the real caravan. Not the one over there.’ Jake gestured at the door. ‘The one over there is inside the real one – like the rest of this place. The real one wasn’t full of bones either. Not like the one over there. And do you know what I found under the seats of the fake one, when I was looking for another staircase? Photograph albums. There was no cellar, but there were loads and loads of photograph albums, full of really old travel snaps. Only they were pictures of bones.

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